Hi,
We need to be able to limit sales by product categories -
for example max. 200 pizzas every day. Here we can not enter every day
the quantity of available products
Yes, it is very hard, but setting some fixed value and not to care about the current day/hour is in fact not a good solution.
Mostly you need to know how many items you sell per day and if there is no more, you just need to update the information that it is just sold out. Mostly as a restaurant manager you should "teach" your customers how do you work with this, so people know what they can expect.
The daily work of manager is just to set
- a weekly menu (set one per 7 days, revised every day)
- a daily menu for next day which means - public menu for customers and private menu for staff including all information about how much "material" will be used
- hour to which it is possible to order - e.g. 10.00 in the morning when the orders for lunch will be stopped - for this purpose, there is opening times feature in Phoca Cart
- and of course update all the information, if there is no item on stock, stop to display it on online menu
And this of course is different for dishes, you are preparing from from 6.00 in the morning and for dishes you can prepare in e.g. half an hour like pizza. I have more experiences with the first variant where you prepare the dishes from 6.00 in the morning and where you have limited items for whole day - so if there is no more item, it is just disabled from offer for whole day - this means interaction and some tasks for managers - you need to know all the items for whole week and you need to react on current situation.
If you do dishes like pizza, maybe it is good to display independent preparation time. So if customers see on your site, the preparation time is e.g. 2 or more hours, then they know, you are overloaded and it in fact means, you are not more able to deliver now. But on the other hand, you don't take people the opportunity to order food for the evening (for example, if someone accepts, you can deliver in 3 hours, why to take him/her the opportunity to order for the time you will be more free).
This is a really difficult thing for a general solution and it has to be solved individually. In any case, it is true that in a restaurant something like setting some fixed items does not work and it has to be done interactively, even in most of restaurants there is no time for this
But if you don't reactor you cannot react interactively, maybe it is not good for you to run online order but to have only order over the phone, etc.
Maybe this feature should be discussed more, some brainstorming should be done, to know:
- what can be done generally
- what should be done more individually
- what should be a part of ecommerce and what should be independent
- etc. etc.
Jan
Jan